Hmm, I believe a tool like this already exists. It's called Tradelane Calculator.

Click here

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Hmm. but the second coordinate on FL's 3D engine is the up and down axis, actually, and a general convention everywhere is x,y,z.

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Yes. and in fact, I can see why that happened now. It looked odd to people who expected x-y to be the map plane. I did some tests earlier, creating objects and checking both displacements and rotations, and the FL coordinates really are standard right-hand xyz. When looking at a map, the standard +X (positive first element of their vectors) points to your right, and the +Y (positive second element of their vectors) is coming out of the screen at you. This is a right-hand coordinate system if +Z is then down along the map - which it is.

The rotation vectors now make sense too since they are body-centered and the body-centered x-y-z match the FL universe frame of reference before any rotations.

I've actually got a working version of it - built it back in October (I think). It's very ugly console program as it stands - and it is sooooo easy to screw up and have to run it again. I'm hoping to get around to making a JAVA applet version that isn't just black and white text over Christmas but not sure if I'll actually end up devoting any time to it (my actual mod has been on hold for over a month now so.......). It does build in 3D and the angles all work correctly (its been tested and I've had some fun crashing into various planets while testing it ).

Do you want it?

I'd love to see it, forgottenlord. And I don't think console = ugly.

They're usually a pain since there aren't good argument parsing libraries on windows, and they can be intimidating to people who aren't used to them, but nothing beats a console tool for automated mass production.

Followup:
Forgotten's console tool is fairly nice, even if you don't like console tools. It actually steps you through the filling in all the critical characteristics for the lane.

Overall, though, it sounds like this is a dead issue for most people; it looks like what is out there works well enough for now.

A couple of quick comments on the alternatives (moderators, feel free to edit if you think I overlooked anything):

+ FLE has this functionality built in. Oddly enough I can't see how to activate it from the UI and never had a clue that it could be done. It apparently takes reading the directions.

+ BL-Winter's trade lane calculator is very good if you want to just have the hard bits of tradelane calculation done for you, and you can handle integrating it into your system ini file. The latest version is here.

Sounds like there is NOT presently a burning need for another tradelane calculator.

Edited by - WatercoolerWarrior on 12/22/2004 5:44:06 AM